SciArt Magazine - All Issues - Page 14

SPOTLIGHT
The Chemistry Notebook of
Maxfield Parrish
By Raphael Rosen
Contributor
When you’re interested in the intersection of art
and science, you can be struck by amazement at any
time, in the unlikeliest of places. For me, my moment
of revelation came in 2003, in The Booksmith, a
neighborhood bookstore on San Francisco’s Haight
Street. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been caught so offguard. I had been working at the Exploratorium for two
years and was being exposed to SciArt wonders every day.
(The Exploratorium is San Francisco’s museum of science,
art, and human perception. It was founded in 1969 by
Frank Oppenheimer, brother of J. Robert Oppenheimer,
one of the architects of the atomic bomb. To get a sense
of the Exploratorium’s atmosphere, imagine walking into
a cavernous warehouse and encountering multimedia
clocks, BioArt exhibits exploring how society perceives
genetic manipulation, and a simple exhibit that lets one
experience the visceral, almost orgasmic pleasure of
rotating a giant ball bearing.) But on this day, on my stroll
through one of San Francisco’s quirkier regions, I was
looking forward to simply ducking into a bookstore and
wiling away the hours browsing the shelves.
I began by flipping through some oversized art books,
the kind that seem to weigh a ton but whose large,
lustrous pictures make the heavy lifting worthwhile. I
eventually came to a book about the American painter
and illustrator Maxfield Parrish, who made work in the
early 20th century. As I recall, it was a survey of his
life and works. At the time, what I knew of his work
was limited to what I had seen on dorm-room posters:
images of fairies and nymphs bathed in an ethereal light.
Otherwise, I knew nothing about Parrish, either as a man
or as an artist.
Everything changed when I turned a page and saw
images of Maxfield Parrish’s chemistry notebook from his
days at Haverford College, in Pennsylvania. Interspersed
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SciArt in America December 2013